Thursday 18 June 2009 14.11 EDT
First published on Thursday 18 June 2009 14.11 EDT

By the standards of most German shepherds, Trakr led a pretty extraordinary life. A trained sniffer dog with a Canadian K9 police unit, he led rescue workers to the last survivor in the rubble of Ground Zero after the New York 9/11 attacks.

Now Trakr, the hero of the September 11 attacks, will enjoy an equally extraordinary afterlife. Though he died in April, aged 16, his memory will live on in the form of five bouncy puppies who look remarkably similar to him. They should do: they are Trakr clones with as identical a match of his DNA as current science will allow.

Trakr's owner and former police handler, James Symington, won a competition last year dubbed the "Golden Clone Giveway". California-based BioArts International, one of the world's largest biotech companies offering pet cloning, said he convinced them that Trakr was the world's most "cloneworthy" dog.

Symington beat 200 other entrants to win a free cloning of his beloved animal, with BioArts throwing in four additional cloned puppies for good measure. In his winning essay Symington wrote that "once in a lifetime, a dog comes along that not only captures the hearts of all he touches but also plays a private role in history."

On 11 September 2001, Symington acted on impulse when he heard the news of the terrorist attacks. He jumped in a van with his loyal dog and drove 14 hours from his home in Halifax, Nova Scotia to Manhattan.

He arrived at Ground Zero to join the first rescue workers to gain access to the site, combing the rubble for survivors. Man and dog spent days among the dust and debris of Ground Zero.

By that point Trakr had retired from active police duty, but had lost none of his olfactory skills. They worked together overnight, concentrating on a specific pile of rubble from the north tower, the first of the skyscrapers to be hit.

According to Rick Cushman, a US national guardsman from Massachusetts who worked alongside Symington and his dog, it was about 6 or 7am on the morning of 12 September that Trakr suddenly caught a "live hit" - a human scent indicating a survivor under the surface. The animal's body froze and his tale went stiff.

Though Trakr himself did not manage to get to the precise spot where the person lay buried, his excitement alerted other rescue workers who homed in on the area. One worker spotted a piece of reflective material on a jacket buried down below.

It belonged to Genelle Guzman, an office worker then aged 31. She had been on the 64th floor of the north tower when the first plane struck. She managed to get down to the 13th floor when the skyscraper collapsed.

She landed on top of a dead firefighter, her head pinned by a concrete pillar but with an air pocket in which she could breathe. She was trapped for about 26 hours before she was discovered and pulled out - emerging as the last of 20 survivors. Just before she was rescued two police officers were also pulled from the rubble, a story immortalised in the Oliver Stone film World Trade Centre.

Cushman has no doubts that Trakr, together with Symington, deserve credit for saving Guzman. "Oh yeah, that dog was a hero all right," he said.

The cloning of Trakr offers Symington a happy ending to a story that was not entirely positive. When he and his dog returned to Halifax at the end of their Ground Zero mission he was hauled before his police superiors and disciplined.

At the time of the attacks Symington had been off work on sick leave for three months suffering from stress. The first that his bosses learnt of his rescue dash to New York was when they saw him and Trakr amid the rubble on television.

Unimpressed, they suspended and later sacked him.

Symington refuses to dwell on that sorry episode, preferring to talk about his new cloned charges. He has called one of the puppies, fittingly, Deja Vu; the others are Trustt, Valour, Prodigy and Solace.

He intends to train them up as search and rescue dogs. "If they show the same intelligence, courage and determination as Trakr they will help to save other lives."

This being the world of private pet cloning, there is also a commercial side to Trakr's replication. Though he was cloned for free, four other dog owners paid on average $144,000 (£88,000) each to have their best friends cloned.

The clonings were all carried out by a team led by the South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-Suk. He was disgraced in 2006 when it was discovered that his claim to have created the first cloned human embryo was a lie.

A spokesman for BioArts said that despite the controversy, Hwang had been recognised as the first scientist in the world to clone a dog. "As a cloning company, we believe in second chances," the spokesman said.